Welcome to the second installment of “Meet the Editorial Board.” We are delighted to introduce you to some more members of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine’s editorial board. If you missed the first installment of this series, please check out the March 2024 issue of the magazine [1]. In this first piece, we talked about how our associate editors contribute to broader academic research and societal good through their work on technology and societal issues. Here we will discuss their contributions to civil society, scholarship, and service to the magazine. Academic editing seems pretty distant from pressing social concerns. However, we submit that the work of the magazine, and our parent society, the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology, is vital to identifying and promoting workable solutions for our most critical social challenges. The interdisciplinary approaches that we highlight, and the interdisciplinary board that we introduce here, use a critical lens to evaluate technological and social solutions. We take a little space here to introduce you to more of the hard-working people who make this magazine work.
We will start with the same question as last time.
How Did You Find your Way to Technology and Society Magazine, or to this Work in General?
Diana Bowman: My interest in technology and society started with my undergraduate degrees in science and law, where I found became fascinated by the technology and society space. Being able to understand much of the technical side has enriched my work and allowed me to better appreciate how scientists and innovators think about their work.
Safiya Noble: I came to technology and society after writing my book on algorithmic discrimination, which discusses how digital platforms like search engines were remaking the information society in ways that were harmful to minoritized people. This work was informed by both my training in sociology and library and information science, and my activism and professional commitments to gender and racial equity.
There is no technology that is not for humans or humanity, and humanity’s history is frequently and irrevocably determined by the state of technology. —Peter Lewis
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Editorial Board–Part II
Diana M. Bowman is an associate dean and a professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85004 USA, and a professor at the College of Global Futures, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287 USA. Her work focuses on the governance of emerging technologies and public health law and policy, with a focus on translational research.
Safiya U. Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential endowed chair of social sciences and a professor of gender studies, african american studies, and information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA. She is the director of the Center on Race and Digital Justice and the co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech and Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She works as the interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies for the campus.
Stephen Cranefield is a professor at the School of Computing, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. His research focuses on techniques for engineering social awareness and cohesion in open communities of autonomous software agents (and their human partners) using computational counterparts of human social concepts such as norms, trust, and common knowledge.
A. David Wunsch is a professor emeritus at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854 USA. His research interests include electromagnetic theory and the history of technology. His expertise is in antennas and antennae in plasma.
Peter Lewis is a Canada research chair at Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, ON L1G 0C5, Canada, where he is an associate professor and the director of the Trustworthy AI Lab. His research advances both foundational and applied aspects of AI and draws on extensive experience applying AI commercially and in the nonprofit sector. He is interested in where AI meets society, and how to help that relationship work well. His current research, funded by Accessibility Standards Canada, NSERC, and NFRF, is concerned with challenges of trust, bias, and accessibility in AI, as well as how to create more socially intelligent AI systems. Lewis has a PhD in computer science from the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K.
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Some of our associate editors came to the technology and society space much later in their careers.
Stephen Cranefield: My work on socially intelligent software systems led to a collaboration with Jeremy Pitt (the previous Editor-in-Chief of this magazine) and his invitation to serve as an associate editor. I see the technology and society role in my own research as helping to ensure that norms are followed within specific socio-technical systems. Being involved with the review process for the magazine has shown me the complexities of the extra-technical portions of these systems and caused me to reflect on the policy and ethical implications of his work. I have not really changed research directions, but my exposure to the magazine has made me more reflective and critical of claims that a specific technology will inexorably lead to a social benefit. Things are usually not that simple.
David Wunsch: I started thinking about the technology–society relationship during the 15 years I spent teaching the history and principles of radio to liberal arts majors at the University of Massachusetts Lowell where I was a Professor of electrical engineering and now holds the rank of Professor Emeritus. Radio was the first invention that permitted the transmission of information to large numbers of people almost instantly. The new technology and emerging layers of regulation surrounding it fascinated me and informed my choice of books to review to this day. My interest in technologies and their emergent regulation led me to join the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and to begin my 20-year tenure as a book reviewer for IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
Peter Lewis: Technology and society became my way to connect my technical expertise with my interests in society. For a long time, it did not seem obvious to me that there would be a route to integrating my interest in politics and passion for social and environmental justice with my academic and research work in computer science. Then, as a faculty member at Aston University, I had the opportunity to work with a large number of companies and organizations around their implementation of AI technologies, and I began to see the social impact—both positive and negative—that this could have. I slowly realized that exploring the socio-technical nature of artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies was in itself a hugely valuable area of work, and so I recentered my work on trust and technology. This really opened the door to exploring a whole range of questions around how people respond to technology in their midst, and what impact technology and the power dynamics it creates can have.
What is the Future in this Space?
Diana: I think this question has to be directed to ChatGPT!
Diana gets to the heart of the challenges with AI and how we use it. Of course, AI is just the latest technology that demonstrates the potential risks and harms that technology can bring. If you are interested in the future of technology and society, Peter reminds us that you are in the right place.
Peter: Honestly, to me, this is *the* space. There is no technology that is not for humans or humanity, and humanity’s history is frequently and irrevocably determined by the state of technology. How this happens at scale, and the impact it has, provide the framing and direction for every other aspect of engineering in my view, for better or worse. AI is a great example of this now: current AI technology is challenging the way we work, learn, and live, and at the same time, it is being developed with a particular set of assumptions and perspectives dominant. I think there is a huge future in empowering people and communities to imagine their own technologies. We need democratized tools, knowledge, and platforms to realize this, and so this also should shape what technology development work is done, and how. In our research, we often talk about “technology-enabled social action,” and I think this holds a lot of promise if we can realize it.
How well AI functions as a tool for our society at large is an important question and one that our associate editors focus on in their work in society at large.
Do You Work with any Civil Society Groups (or Other Engagement) and How Does that Affect your Work?
How well AI functions as a tool for our society at large is an important question and one that our associate editors focus on in their work in society at large. I asked what work the associate editors do to support civil society.
Safiya: I work with a number of digital civil rights organizations including the UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice, the Minderoo Initiative on Tech and Power, and the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). CCRI is an important force in protecting victims of deepfakes and nonconsensual pornography and advocating for better legal protections around new and evolving technologies that violate personal privacy or profit from the sale of intimate data.
Diana: Being able to help policymakers think through the impact of new technology and help craft appropriate policy or legislative responses to emerging products or processes is the most rewarding aspect of her work.
Peter: We have deep collaborations with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), on the accessibility of AI and the trustworthiness of assistive technology, and The Pamoja Institute for Community Engagement and Action, a nonprofit working with the Black community around Toronto, on challenges of health equity and food security. Our work is exploring ways that technology can support the great work these organizations do, and also how technology should be co-designed with communities of equity-deserving groups to enable and empower social action. Our partnerships with groups such as these shape everything we do—it challenges any assumption of uncritical “tech solutionism,” sadly prevalent in so much research and product development today, while at the same time showing us new opportunities to reimagine technology in a way that can empower humanity to be its best self. We have previously published some discussions around this work in Technology and Society Magazine.
What Movie or Book Would you Recommend to Our Readers?
We will close this installment with a few recommendations for reading and watching.
Stephen: One favorite book that has relevance to IEEE Technology and Society Magazine is Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I read this short story in my youth, and although the details of the plot faded over the years, it lodged in my mind as a compelling (and sad) story. A few years ago, I discovered it had been extended into a novel and recommend it as a vivid depiction of the potential human cost of adopting an inadequately tested innovation.
Diana: This is a tough one—I have to say The Princess Bride. It has been a favorite of mine since I used to watch it with my mother and sister as a child. And my favorite book would have to be Hamlet. Related to the societal challenges presented by technological innovation, though I would have to go with something along the lines of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The rest of the associate editors recommended non-fiction.
Safiya: I have been revisiting C. Wright Mills’ work, which was an early inspiration during my undergraduate studies in sociology. I am also enjoying reading a number of contributions by Black scholars to the history of the internet with one of my UCLA doctoral students, Ngozi Harrison, for an alternative history of the internet we’re co-authoring.
As might be expected from a book editor, David gave four recommendations.
David: Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis gives a nice introduction to the history of radio, while The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage tells the story of the first means of communication by electromagnetic means. I will also recommend two classics—The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn and The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx. Both have been in print for over half a century.
Peter: I recommend Our Friends in the North. It is a British TV mini-series made in the 1990s that explores the social history of working people in the United Kingdom through the latter half of the 20th century, through the eyes of four friends, and with a focus on corruption and access to quality housing. As someone who grew up in England, this was perhaps one of the most informative and hard-hitting things I watched about the real socio-political state of the country for most people. Add to that that it pretty much launched the careers of Christopher Ecclestone, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee, and Mark Strong, and features an all-round brilliant cast—James Bond and Dr Who, sitting in a council flat talking about police corruption—what is not to like?
Ketra: This round-up of largely nonfiction recommendations goaded me to make some nonfiction recommendations of my own. I recently read Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. These two books relate complementary histories that highlight the ways that both democracy and the freedom to organize labor, vote, and live an unencumbered life have been continuously renegotiated in the United States. What struck me most about both books was the role that human agency and sense of possibility—both individual and collective—have in creating change, and the power of individuals and collective pressure in changing our reality. I am humbled to be in the company of the associate editors who serve IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
Problems at the social–technical interface are critically important to ensure a livable future. We hope that the collective work of the magazine helps to achieve that future.
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